


you couldn't help it (everybody has strange things that mean things to them.)

by ftwnhgn



Category: Groundhog Day - Minchin/Rubin
Genre: Best Friends, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, F/M, Post-Canon, Post-Loop, mentions of past relationships - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-12-11 14:41:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11716470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ftwnhgn/pseuds/ftwnhgn
Summary: It’s half past one AM and they’re sitting across from each other on Rita’s couch, a finished UNO game and plates of pizza on the coffee table and an episode of Seinfeld running on the TV, though they muted it about ten minutes ago. Rita’s legs are thrown over Phil’s, they’re both leaning against the armrests with their backs and she’s balancing the remote and an empty glass on her knees while a bowl full of cookies she baked is resting on Phil’s thighs.“Your first crush. C’mon, tell me,” she demands after her gaze flickers back from the TV to rest on his face.





	you couldn't help it (everybody has strange things that mean things to them.)

**Author's Note:**

> You know what you do when you're finally through with studying for your finals and have carpal tunnel syndrome and aren't allowed to write? You use your Saturday night to write what you wanted to write since. probably March or April. As one does. I'm happy to finally write something for Groundhog Day because I love the musical so, so much and in my heart Andy Karl won a Tony, the show won best book and Barrett was nominated. 
> 
> You can decide for yourself if they're together in this or just best friends, though I'd like to argue that they're the loves of each other's lives in any scenario. Platonic or romantic, doesn't matter, they're the dynamic duo we deserve.
> 
> I went through several headcanons with this rather short piece, though I thought it would be much shorter than this. And if you find any errors, I am deeply sorry, bc english is not my first language but I try.
> 
> Title: The Garden Of Eden - Ernest Hemingway

It’s half past one AM and they’re sitting across from each other on Rita’s couch, a finished UNO game and plates of pizza on the coffee table and an episode of Seinfeld running on the TV, though they muted it about ten minutes ago. Rita’s legs are thrown over Phil’s, they’re both leaning against the armrests with their backs and she’s balancing the remote and an empty glass on her knees while a bowl full of cookies she baked is resting on Phil’s thighs.

“Your first crush. C’mon, tell me,” she demands after her gaze flickers back from the TV to rest on his face. Her socked toes are poking his right shin.

Phil rolls his eyes as his first answer to her question, though he knows she won’t stop bothering him until he tells her, because Rita’s like that. And while he really loves her, her _prosecutor-slash-detective-like_ questioning of _anything_ in Phil’s life – especially his past – makes him feel like he’s on a stand and pledging for his life. It’s been years full of not opening up like that to anyone and he kind of forgot that being so close to someone meant unearthing everything about his life.

And he’s not good at talking about his life. His therapists know that.

So, he bends forward and swats at her toes to make them stop nudging into his skin. He doesn’t want to be an asshole about it, not with her, but his shin started to feel like a battleground for her toes and he’d like to be comfortable when he digs out another memory he hasn’t spoken about in decades.

(Probably only years, but he has literally lost any sense of time during the loop. Could be decades for him and years for her, that’s how far away it feels, but he’s not going to start with _that_ topic now.)

“Well,” he starts instead. “I was six – “

Rita throws the pillow behind her head at him with force and he laughs before it even hits the side of his head.

“No, _you_ _idiot_ ,” she says. “Like, your first big crush. That made you really _feel_ something. That changed you. The big stuff, y’know what I mean.”

 _Of course_ Phil knows what she means. He hardly doesn’t know what she means when she talks to him and that’s the problem here. For once, he’d like to _not_ be so sure about what she wants to know from him.

“Okay,” he sighs then and takes a cookie between his hands, turning it around before breaking it in the middle and offering her one half. Rita takes it and they settle back, but she gestures Phil to go on.

“I was nineteen or twenty - I’m not sure about that, it’s been a while since then, but I remember it was during one of my first years in college. We had to do these internships to get college credits and to have – wait, how did they phrase it? Let me get this right – “ _work experience before the job_ ” and people in the industry already knowing you 'cause it’s easier to get jobs this way, though, it was kind of unusual to not get a job after college. Because, you know, weather kind of exists everywhere and since even before the start of humanity, so obviously we’d all get a job and –“

“ _Phil!_ ” she interrupts him, laughing. “You’re rambling. I love hearing about your college journey and all that, but we've covered that in depth at least three times already and I’d like you to get to the point.”

Her voice is amused but not unkind and it reminds him of all the phone calls she _always_ picks up on when he’s having another one of his crisis and doesn’t know how to calm down. Sometimes he can’t believe she’s real. And sometimes he can’t believe how he couldn’t even like her. He must have been out of his goddamn mind back then, because how could anyone not like Rita, yet not fall in love with her?

“Okay, okay, okay. Got ‘ya,” the cookie half in his hand has crumbled into tiny chunks that are now sitting on top of the other cookies in the bowl and Phil’s tempted to take another one and do the same to it. Just to have something in his hands to focus on when he tells her this story. He never told anyone this story before, he notices.

“So, I was at this weather channel as an intern. It was my first time actually working at a weather channel and was the closest I’ve ever been to my dream job, you know? So I didn’t think anything of it. I thought that I just admired the guy. That I was envious of what he was doing because he was doing what I wanted to do since I was five, or God knows, even earlier. He was great at his job too, the best weather man I’ve ever seen, like, next to me.” His own hands are particularly interesting but Phil can’t help but glance up to Rita, who’s watching him with an intense look in her eyes – no, _not_ intense, _focused, invested_ – and she does the hand-waving again to gesture to him to keep going when she sees he’s looking at her.

“He was, like, a good chunk of years older than me and as far as I knew back then he had a girlfriend. Didn’t stop me from lying awake each night and thinking about him. Though, time of the day didn't really matter, I couldn't stop thinking about him, period. And not only about what he did at work. That’s when it kind of hit me that I, well. That I wasn’t only interested in his work ethic and technique. That it’s more than admiration. Caused me having a panic attack in the green room because, _of course_ , I figured it out in the middle of a fucking broadcast. They finished the show but I still remember that he came looking for me and talked me down from it,” Phil looks at the short ends of his nails while he talks, examining their length and cleanliness.  “The thing with telling me numbers and having me repeat them in the right order I told you to do for me when I can’t get out of it? I got that from him,” he admits hastily and swallows before he continues.

“I never told him, you know? Couldn’t do that to him and I mean, I thought I was straight before that happened, so I was also busy with figuring out what was going on with myself. And that moment in the green room was only fuel to the fire because, fuck, he was so, so _kind_ ,” Phil thinks back and wonders out loud. “Probably the kindest man I met back then. But, as you phrased it, he made me feel things. It was completely different to how it’s always been in high school with classmates. So, that must have been the first.”

After he finished, he rises his chin up and looks at Rita, who holds her glass and the remote close to her chest, her eyes still trained on him.

“He was the first,” she repeats after a few beats of silence and nods to herself. “And was he the last?” she then asks, her voice wondering yet soft.

“ _Well_ , there was you,” Phil answers and Rita rolls her eyes at that. They’ve been over this often enough but she was and still is one of the few people who made Phil feel intensely and changed him because of it. For the better, no less. A true wake-up call, after all. “No, you know that I mean it! But I don’t know. I never really had many serious relationships throughout college and work, ‘cause the job’s always been more important. A few people, yes, but nothing that affected me a lot. _You know_ how I was before Punxsutawney.”

He cringes at the memory, but he needed to address this once more. That before the loop – _before her_ – he was a completely different man and most notably not one for long-lasting relationships full of trust and love and monogamy. And if it wasn’t for the loop, he’d probably still have the same view of romance in his head. Unchanged and cynical and shallow and mean. He was mean, he knows this, but he stopped blaming himself for it. It’s lost time anyway.

“Oh, I know how you were before that, yes. But I also thought you were nuts, so I don’t know how accurate my view of you was,” she responses and bless Rita Hanson for always seeing his good parts. He has a hard-enough time with it but she’s always making it look so easy. Okay, she’s also pretty good at bringing him down to earth, but that’s because she knows he can be better, work better, achieve better and act better.

They’re silent for a minute again, Phil watching how the TV light casts shadows on Rita’s face and throat while she looks at the screen and, in that moment, he’s grateful he’s gotten to know her and that she grew into the biggest fix-point in his life. The lighthouse to always bring him back on track. If he deserves this, he's not sure, but he wants to keep her right here next to him. The two of them against the world.

“What about you?” he asks her and makes he turn her head back towards him again.

“What do you mean, what about me?” she replies, a crease appearing right up her nose and between her eyebrows.

“I’m not going to be the only one to skinny dip into matters of the heart tonight, Hanson! Your turn,” Phil answers, grinning. “Your first crush. The first person to make you really feel things,” he adds, teasing her with her own words.

Rita doesn’t have to think as long as he did before she answers and Phil is not sure what that says about him. Or her. Or, overall, them. They’re very different people, it’s obvious, but when it comes to emotional stuff they’ve always been going into the same direction - mostly.

Well, except when it comes to _love_ , he realizes then.

Maybe he shouldn’t be surprised anymore, though she's good at surprising him. Even after all this time.

“There were two,” Rita says and stops Phil’s chance to elaborate his track of thought into a forest full of paths and crossroads of ideas and thoughts and opinions.

“Not at the same time, but there were two,” she repeats herself and he can see her focusing on the TV rather than him. He doesn’t blame her. “The first one was in senior year of high school. We’ve been friends for maybe two years. But not that close, just in the same group of friends. We revised a lot together since the beginning of the school year and I started to see him in a different light about two months in. He was my first serious boyfriend, so kind of important. And he was kind and a good listener and he made me laugh. We were together till the end of our first year in college, but we grew apart too much to stay in a relationship, so we mutually broke it off. We’re still friends, though.”

Phil nods and wonders how that guy was like. Probably liked biking a lot. And probably the kind of guy who was more into literature than sports, if he struck a nerve with teenage-Rita. He wonders if he will ever meet the guy and is a bit surprised that he hasn’t already.

“He moved to Seattle a few years ago, works there as a chief editor for some magazine. Very busy. We keep in touch but he’s doesn’t have a lot of time to come down here. I would have introduced you two already, if he wouldn’t live so far away,” she says, like an afterthought.

Well, that answers that question for Phil.

“You said there was another one, that there were two people. Who’s the second?” Phil asks her instead because he’s still curious.

“A woman I met in my last year of college,” Rita answers and now she takes a moment to look over to Phil, who just nods, waiting for the rest of the story. “We were together for three years all through the end of college and after that. It was one of these one of a kind relationships you hear about, you know? One of these great ones. Really something.”

Rita reaches over and takes a cookie out of the bowl in Phil’s lap. “As far as I know she has a wife now. They’ve been together for years.”

He doesn’t miss the short taste of bitterness in the edge of her voice and the tense line of her jaw as she says this. So probably not the ending for this part of her life she actually pictured.

“And you are okay with this?” he asks her carefully, not daring to crack a joke or mock her. Not when he can see how her eyebrows are drawn together as she gives the cookie in her hand a glare that could compete with a snow storm in terms of coldness and sharpness.

“I have to,” she answers curtly. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m over it. I mended my broken heart and it’s not like I wasn’t in relationships after it. But the last few months of our relationship and the break-up are not something I’d like to go through again or like to think back to. Or like to _talk_ about.”

“I’m sorry,” is the best Phil can come up with but he has the feeling he comes up short.

“Bridges all burned,” she says. She looks over and gives him a short smile, shrugs her shoulders. Case closed is what her body language tells him.

Phil puts the cookies onto the coffee table and bends over to throw himself half onto Rita, who yelps in a mixture of surprise and discomfort as their heads knock together. Her hands flail up and fist into his hair in the process, but Phil ignores it and throws an arm around her stomach, settling his chin on one of her shoulders.

“Are you alright, Connors?” she asks helplessly with one arm squished between his head and a cushion and the other one over his own shoulder.

“More than alright,” he answers, a smile appearing on his face. “You just looked like you needed a hug,” he tells her and kisses her temple.

“Oh,” Rita answers, distress leaping out of her body and her voice. “Well, thanks, I guess.”

They stay like this for a while, just enjoying the warmth and closeness of their position, until Phil has to resettle so he’s not stopping the blood flow in Rita’s arm anymore, and they end up with his head in her lap and her hands softly going through his hair, sometimes tugging on the short strands in amusement. His arm is still across her stomach, his fingers curled into the fabric of her sweatpants. The Seinfeld reruns have ended, so they switched the channels until they agreed on a documentary about the industrial revolution during the Victorian era, though they’re both not really listening.

“You know, Phil, I’m glad I ended up with you,” Rita tells him as she watches the English claim India and Phil watches her. She has a smile on her face again.

“Yeah, me too. Could be worse,” he answers and gets a punch to his shoulder for this.

“Shut up!”

“You’re stuck with me now, ‘cause I ain’t about leaving, Hanson. And maybe I turn out to be as nuts as you thought, after all,” Phil jokes, poking her thigh with his thumb.

“Oh, you are as nuts as I thought,” Rita assures him. “But I wouldn’t want to have it any other way.”

Phil smiles. “Me too,” he repeats and her hand curls around his temple as she bows down to kiss his forehead.

And he’s right, he thinks. It all could be worse.

**Author's Note:**

> i didn't put a rating on it despite swear words bc you know it's groundhog day, so you kinda know what's coming. and the title seems to be longer than the story itself but ANYWAYS, hope this was alright!
> 
> hey, so, if you have liked that, leave a comment if you want, or chat with me on tumblr (andreinbolkonsky) or twitter (xbigboysdontcry) where I post about my groundhog day and other musicals no one to little people care about
> 
> a reminder: you are loved, you are enough and you will achieve great things. you are right just the way you are, a living and breathing thing. keep going.


End file.
